Internet of Things (IoT) Setup the Tessel

How-To Details

Prior to starting this tutorial you should have your Tessel device and a USB cable. For Windows machines simply plugging in the device will often result in the drivers be installed whereas a Apple Mac OS X or Linux machine require a bit more effort to install.

You should also be familiar with working with the command prompt in Windows or the Terminal or Shell in Mac or Linux.

After this tutorial you can choose either the On-Premise or the Cloud route.

In rare cases of problems with automatic installation of the driver on Windows machines please use Zadig utility to manually install WinUSB driver for the Tessel device in Windows OS.If Tessel is not visible on the list of devices in Zadig, then go to Options and select List All Devices.

Once you have correct version of Node.js installed and the Tessel driver installed, ensure your Tessel is plugged in via the USB cable. Then you should be able to run the following command (this will be from either the CMD prompt in Windows or the Terminal or Shell in Mac or Linux)

tessel list
TM-00-04-f000da30-0062434f-4a8145c2

If it shows the serial number of the connected Tessel device, then you are good to proceed with exercises.

Now that your device is connected you can write your first JavaScript application and execute it on our device.

The first application to write is blinky.js this makes the on-board LED’s of the device blink rapidly. The code is rather simple and more information can be found here: https://t1-start.tessel.io/blinky.

Before you run this code, you do need to ensure that you have a proper text editor or preferably a code editor installed. There are several options for this such as Chocolat for Mac OS X or Notepad++ you can use any but something designed for code and syntax highlighting is ideal.

Code for this small JavaScript application is simple and straight forward but you do need to understand some basics of the language.

Three of these modules are Climate, Ambient and Accelerometer. While you can try any of the sensors on hand, it is highly recommend you start with one of these 3 sensors.

In particular the Climate sensor you will enhance later in the exercises to provide data to your SAP Cloud Platform account.

When working with the different modules you should create a separate folder under your tessel-code folder, the reason for this is that when you install the libraries for the module it’s best to do this in a new directory because when you create your JavaScript code and then run that on the device it deploys the libraries at the same time and thus best to not have everything inside the same exact folder.